Alcott Louisa May - SSC 14 Read online

  In 1862, in the midst of the Civil War, Frank Leslies Illustrated Newspaper, a popular New York weekly devoted to alluring pictures, gossip, and murder trials, offered a one-hundred-dollar prize for a story. To pay the family debts and at the same time to give vent to the pent-up emotions of her thirty years, Louisa Alcott wrote the first of her blood-and-thunder tales. Though it would be published anonymously, “Pauline’s Passion and Punishment” bore the stamp of its author, who immediately developed her own technique and outlined a theme to which she would often return. While her plots were violent enough and her backdrops remote enough to merit classification in the Gothic genre, Louisa was principally concerned with character. Of all the characters she adumbrated in these narratives the one who came most completely to life and who obviously was as intriguing to her author as to readers was the passionate, richly sexual femme fatale who had a mysterious past, an electrifying present, and a revengeful future. In such a heroine—so different from the submissive heroine of the Gothic formula—Louisa May Alcott could distill her passion for dramatics and her feminist anger at a world of James Richardsons. At the same time she could win a sorely needed hundred dollars.

  In “Pauline’s Passion and Punishment,” as in all the Alcott thrillers, the reader is immediately introduced to problems of character rather than of plot. The suspense lies less in what the heroine will do than in what the heroine is, although both considerations become entwined as the character develops and the plot advances. In a fascinating opening, the anonymous author places onstage her Pauline, a proud and passionate woman who has lost all—fortune and, as a result of one man’s perfidy, love. She is left with her fury and her desire for revenge, emotions which become the motivating forces in an ironic plot.

  Against the background of an exotic paradise, a green wilderness where the tamarind vies with the almond tree, the spotlight falls upon Pauline Valary, pacing “to and fro, like a wild creature in its cage,” a “handsome woman, with bent head, locked hands, and restless steps.” She is a woman scorned by her lover, Gilbert Redmond, who has abandoned her for a moneyed bride. In swift course she arouses the devotion of the sensitive, young, southern romantic Manuel, who, attracted by her implicit sexuality, becomes not only her husband but her accomplice in the intended destruction of Gilbert Redmond. She does not plan Gilbert’s murder but some more subtle revenge. “There are fates more terrible than death, weapons more keen than poniards, more noiseless than pistols. . . . Leave Gilbert to remorse—and me.” And so, on page 1 of her thriller, the already skillful author has sketched in her characters, spotlighted her heroine, set her scene, and suggested a suspenseful plot.

  The suspense mounts in the search for Gilbert and the dramatic encounter with him and his bride. The character is embroidered as Pauline’s “woman’s tongue” avenges her and “with feminine skill” she “mutely conveys the rebuke she would not trust herself to utter, by stripping the glove from the hand he had touched, and dropping it disdainfully.” The meeting of Gilbert and Pauline is the meeting of man and woman, a meeting in which Pauline silently accepts Gilbert’s challenge to the “tournament so often held between man and woman —a tournament where the keen tongue is the lance, pride the shield, passion the fiery steed, and the hardest heart the winner of the prize, which seldom fails to prove a barren honor, ending in remorse.” And so faint alarms and excursions subtly suggest without overtly revealing the denouement.

  Pauline’s inexorable anger intensifies until she is possessed by a devil—not one with a cloven hoof but a subtle psychological force for evil. Her little stage performance and “drama of deceit”—all Louisa’s heroines are actresses on the stage or off—her machinations to bankrupt Gilbert “in love, honor, liberty, and hope” fail utterly in the end.

  The winner of Frank Leslie’s one-hundred-dollar prize adopted the pseudonym of A. M. Barnard for a tale she submitted to another flamboyant weekly, The Flag of Our Union. Despite her preoccupation with passionate and angry heroines, Louisa was already too skillful a writer to repeat herself without variation. “The Abbot’s Ghost: or, Maurice Treherne’s Temptation” is set in no exotic Cuban paradise but a haunted English abbey replete with screaming peacocks, thick- walled gallery and arched stone roof, armored figures and an abbot’s ghost. A Dickensian flavor attaches to these Gothic appurtenances as, sitting round the hall fire, the dramatis personae tell tales of ghosts and coffins, skeletons and haunted houses. The star of that dramatis personae is less the hero of the title than the magnificent Edith Snowden, a strong-willed woman burdened by a heavy cross, a mysterious past, and jealousies that conflict with “contending emotions of . . . remorse and despair.” “The Abbot’s Ghost” is filled with psychological insights that illuminate the subtle relationships of the characters. The plot, revolving principally about the sudden cure of the crippled Maurice Treherne and ending with a triple wedding in the abbey, is basically a love story narrated against a strongly Gothic background. It comes to life through the brilliant depiction of a woman of passion and power whose furies are banked by her innate nobility.

  Unlike the anonymous “Pauline’s Passion” and the pseudonymous “Abbot’s Ghost,” The Mysterious Key has a male hero, a charming young Italianate Englishman, and unlike either of those narratives, The Mysterious Key was published over the name of Louisa May Alcott. The possibility suggests itself that Louisa insisted upon secrecy less for her blood-and-thunder stories in general than for her passionate and angry heroines in particular.

  The hero of The Mysterious Key combines a touch of that Polish boy who, with Alf Whitman, was to become the Laurie of Little Women, and a strong hint of the pale and ardent Italian patriot Maz- zini. Pauls appearance at the Trevlyn home in Warwickshire—an estate adequately equipped with haunted room and state chamber- touches off an elaborate plot. Well paced, it depends for its unfoldment upon a prophetic rhyme and a mysterious black-bearded visitor, a sealed letter and an ancient family volume, pretended sleepwalking, a touch of bigamy and a blind ward, Helen. The silver key that opens the Trevlyn tomb and discloses a mildewed paper proving Helen’s identity is less mysterious and less intriguing than the hero Paul who, as Paolo, had been—like Mazzini—a hero in the Italian Revolution. All loose ends—and there are many—are neatly tied as the silver key slips into the door of a grisly tomb unlocking “a tragedy of life and death.”

  Between “Pauline’s Passion,” written in 1862, and The Mysterious Key, which appeared in 1867, Louisa wrote other gaudy, gruesome, and psychologically perceptive thrillers. Sitting incognito behind her pen, she produced “V. V.: or, Plots and Counterplots,” an involved tale about a danseuse, Virginie Varens, whose flesh bore the tattooed letters V. V. above a lover’s knot. A mysterious iron ring, drugged coffee, four violent deaths, and a viscount parading as a deaf-and-dumb Indian servant were the ingredients of this heady witch’s broth. Poison vied with pistols or daggers for “the short road to . . . revenge,” garments were dyed with blood, the heroine concluded her dark bargain, and the author doubtless recalled with nostalgia the comic tragedies of her childhood. This flight into the all-but-impossible not only emblazoned the pages of a sensational newspaper but was reprinted as a ten-cent novelette.

  Like “V. V.,” “A Marble Woman: or, The Mysterious Model” was filled with a variety of plots and counterplots as well as a colorful cast of characters that included a sculptor, Bazil Yorke, and an opiumeating heroine. The plight of Mme. Mathilde Arnheim was pursued by the indefatigable writer in The Skeleton in the Closet, the narrative of a woman married to an idiot husband and bound to him by a tie which death alone could sever.

  Of all the blood-and-thunder tales conceived by Louisa May Alcott when her hair was down and her dander up, the most extraordinary—in this critic’s opinion at least—is the one that gives this book its title. “Behind a Mask: or, A Woman’s Power” is not only per se a suspenseful story recounted in a masterly manner; it fuses in its crucible many of the elements that had gone into the life of its
author.

  It engrosses the reader while it makes use of and reflects the experiences and emotions of its creator. “Behind a Mask” is therefore a Gothic roman a clef, a fast-moving narrative whose episodes unlock the past not only of the heroine Jean Muir but of the writer Louisa Alcott. Behind this mask, perhaps, the future author of Little Women sits for a dark but revealing portrait.

  Jean Muir is many things: a woman bent, like Pauline Valary, upon revenge; a woman who, to achieve her ends, resorts to all sorts of coquetries and subterfuges including the feigning of an attempted suicide; a woman filled with anger directed principally against the male lords of creation. But she is primarily an actress.

  The arrival of a new governess at the ancestral Coventry estate in England—a role played by Jean Muir—sets the plot in motion. She appears, pale-faced, small, and thin, not more than nineteen years old, and the first scene she enacts is an effective, sympathy-arousing faint. “Scene first, very well done,” murmurs the astute Gerald, to which she replies, “The last scene shall be still better.”

  The mystery is suggested, the suspense begun, the plot laid down when, in the privacy of her room, Miss Muir proceeds to open a flask and drink “some ardent cordial,” remove the braids from her head, wipe the pink from her face, take out “several pearly teeth” and emerge “a haggard, worn, and moody woman of thirty. . . . The metamorphosis was wonderful. . . . her mobile features settled into their natural expression, weary, hard, bitter. . . , brooding over some wrong, or loss, or disappointment which had darkened all her life.” Very gradually Miss Muir's transformation is made intelligible until she develops into one of Miss Alcott's most fascinating heroines. Like Pauline Valary she is, of course, a femme fatale with whom every male member of the Coventry household, including the fifty-five-year- old Sir John Coventry, falls madly in love. Her background is mysterious. She has lived in Paris, traveled in Russia, can sing brilliant Italian airs and read character. Her powers are fatal. She confesses to one of her lovers, “I am a witch, and one day my disguise will drop away and you will see me as I am, old, ugly, bad and lost.”

  Jean Muir is indeed a psychological if not a Gothic witch. Proud and passionate, mysterious and mocking, she wields a subtle spell. Motivated like Pauline by thwarted love, she carries out her intention of ruining the Coventry family with deliberation, using all the dramatic skills known to the theater. She lies or cries at will, feigns timidity or imperiousness to suit her needs. In a remarkable episode, when impromptu tableaux are performed in the great saloon of Coventry Hall, Miss Muir darkens her skin, paints her brows, and writes hatred on her face. Success crowns all her efforts for she captures her prize —the middle-aged head of the House of Coventry and with him a title and an estate. Meanwhile her secret is out. And what a feminist secret it is!

  The temptation at the Mill Dam, the humiliation at Dedham, the theatrical barnstorming, the readings in Gothic romances were all stirred in the caldron of “Behind a Mask.” So too were Louisa’s conflicting emotions, her hates and her loves, her challenge to fortune. Weaving from these varied threads a tale of evil and passion, of fury and revenge, A. M. Barnard had used her sources well.

  Just why Louisa May Alcott selected that pseudonym remains conjectural. “A.M.” were her mothers initials—Abigail May; “Barnard” might have been suggested by the distinguished Connecticut educator Henry Barnard, who was a family friend. For the most part, the thrillers, whether pseudonymous, anonymous, or upon one or two occasions in her own name, were issued by two publishing firms. One of them boasted an editor who was as much of a femme fatale as L. M. Alcott could conjure up. The other included a partner whose life strongly suggested the episodes of a sensational novel. In her editorial and publishing negotiations therefore, A. M. Barnard—whether she was aware of it or not—was among kindred spirits.

  “Wrote two tales for L.,” Louisa noted in her 1862 journal. “I enjoy romancing to suit myself; and though my tales are silly, they are not bad; and my sinners always have a good spot somewhere. I hope it is good drill for fancy and language, for I can do it fast; and Mr. L. says my tales are so ‘dramatic, vivid, and full of plot,’ they are just what he wants.” And a few months later: “Rewrote the last story, and sent it to L., who wants more than I can send him.”

  1862 was the year of Antietam and Fredericksburg. It was not for the home circle alone that so-called family newspapers and cheap paperbacks were printed, but for soldiers in camp who could while away tedious hours between battles by escaping to an ancestral estate in Britain or a tropical paradise in Cuba. As the war gathered momentum, the market for such literature widened and with it the need for new authors and new stories.

  The "L.” of Louisa’s journal, to whom she offered '‘Pauline’s Passion” in competition for the announced hundred-dollar prize, was well aware of this need. Frank Leslie,28 publisher of Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper, had his hand on the public pulse. He had begun life as Henry Carter, wood engraver in England, adopted the pseudonym of Frank Leslie, and migrated to America. Ruddy, black- bearded, aggressive, dynamic, he had in 1855 launched his Illustrated Newspaper, a project that was to make him a power on New York’s Publishers’ Row. With its graphic cuts of murders and assassinations, prizefights and fires, the weekly was to dominate the field of illustrated journalism for nearly .three-quarters of a century. It sported just enough text to float the pictures instead of just enough pictures to float the text. Thanks to a clever and ingenious device, Leslie was able to produce his pictures—sometimes mammoth double-page engravings —with unprecedented speed. Thanks to his editorial staff, he was able to select text that titillated an ever-expanding readership whether it gathered at hearth or campfire.

  It was E. G. Squier who wrote to Louisa May Alcott in December, 1862, when she herself was nursing at the Union Hotel Hospital: “Your tale ‘Pauline’ this morning was awarded the $100 prize for the best short tale for Mr. Leslie’s newspaper, and you will hear from him in due course in reference to what you may regard as an essential part of the matter. I presume that it will be on hand for those little Christmas purchases. Allow me to congratulate you on your success and to recommend you to submit whatever you may hereafter have of the same sort for Mr. Leslie’s acceptance.”

  E. G. Squier, scholar-archaeologist serving temporarily as a Leslie editor, was married to another Leslie protegee who could have served as prototype for every one of Louisa’s femmes fatales. Miriam Florence Squier30 had been born in New Orleans in 1836, and throughout a stormy, flamboyant, and successful life in the North she remained a southern belle. Much of that life would have fascinated A. M. Barnard. Between Miriam’s first two marriages she had gone barnstorming with Lola Montez under the stage name of Minnie Montez. As knowledgeable editor of the House of Leslie she sported a blue stocking on one leg, but her other leg was encased in a stocking as scarlet as any worn by Pauline Valary or Jean Muir. Eventually Mrs. Squier would marry not only Frank Leslie but his publishing domain, becoming a grande dame and a forcible power as head of the House of Leslie before going on to other conquests marital and extramarital.

  In A. M. Barnard’s heyday, during the early 1860’s, this was the colorful trio who managed the Leslie publications. With the new year of 1863 Frank Leslies Illustrated Newspaper announced that, after deliberating over the moral tendency and artistic merit of over two hundred manuscripts, the editor had decided to award the first prize to “a lady of Massachusetts” for “Pauline’s Passion and Punishment.” In the next number, the first half of a story of “exceeding power, brilliant description, thrilling incident and unexceptionable moral” was anonymously published, with appropriate illustrations of “Manuel reading Gilbert’s Letter” and “Gilbert’s Despair at Pauline’s Final Rejection.” “Received $100 from F.L.,” Louisa commented in her journal, “for a tale which won the prize last January; paid debts, and was glad that my winter bore visible fruit.”

  Other seasons also bore visible fruit that ripened in the Leslie period
icals. “A Whisper in the Dark,” a tale too mild for A. M. Barnard but too lurid for L. M. Alcott, and “Enigmas,” a mystery about Italian refugees, a spy and a woman disguised as a man, made their bows in the Illustrated Newspaper. In 1866 Miriam Squier reminded Louisa May Alcott that Frank Leslie would be glad to receive a sensational story from her every month at fifty dollars each.

  By that time the tireless author was receiving between two and three dollars a column for thrillers produced for a Boston publishing firm headed by yet another remarkable trio. In the ears of those three gentlemen the call of the wild still echoed, for one had edited tales that embodied it, a second had yielded to it by sailing to New Granada aboard the Crescent City, and a third had been the hero of a sensational novel which, if written, would have included chapters on the conquest of California, gold digging, a jaunt to the Sandwich and Fiji islands, China, and Australia. If A. M. Barnard was ever at a loss for a plot she needed merely to hearken to the lives of Messrs. Elliott, Thornes, and Talbot of Boston. William Henry Thornes, who had succumbed to gold fever, had also encountered Indians, coyotes, and grizzlies, had sailed aboard an opium smuggler that plied between China and California, and was himself a mine of suggestions for authors whose thrilling romances he would publish. As publisher of the True Flag, James R. Elliott had edited the type of story William Thornes had lived. The two formed a publishing partnership in 1861, a year after the New York firm of Beadle had introduced their dime- novel series to an avid American reading public. Joined by Newton Talbot, who had listed to the call of the wild by sailing to New Granada, the trio set out their shingle on Boston s Washington Street and, like the House of Leslie in New York, proceeded to issue a chain of periodicals and novelettes that would bring adventure and romance to a nation at war.